Star Wars: Character Encyclopedia by Simon Beecroft

Happy Star Wars Reads Day! It's the day where people all around North America celebrate Star Wars and reading. As I mentioned the other day, DK Publishing is celebrating by offering 30% off Star Wars books (for a limited time). These terrific books can be found in their Star Wars Boutique.

For more information about Star Wars Reads Day, go to the official site. There are activities planned all across North America.

A free downloadable Star Wars Reads Activity Kit with recipes, crafts, colouring pages and games can found at both the DK site and the official Star Wars Reads Day site.

Today, I'm posting a review of one of the books in DK's Star Wars Boutique. 

May the force be with you. 

Star Wars: Character Encyclopedia features more than 200 characters from all six Star Wars films plus the Clone Wars. It gives various statistics and information on each of the characters.

Great book!! It was so much some to learn all of the cool facts about each of the characters. I loved that the book was presented alphabetically by character's first name or title. That made it easy to find the characters I was most interested in reading about. I did eventually go through them all, but I wanted to find my favourites first.

Each character takes up one page. There's a large labelled photograph of the character in addition to smaller photos and lots of information about the character. The data file lists various attributes of the characters. It's different for the character types, but it could include:
• affiliation
• type
• manufacturer
• height
• home world
• species
• diet
• habitat
• life span
• appearances (lists the movies in which the character appears)
• See Also (lists similar or related characters)

All of these were helpful to know, but I especially loved the "affiliation" and "appearances" ones. Because I'm not the most avid Star Wars fan and I didn't recognize a bunch of the characters right off, but these two attributes helped to put the characters into context. The characters who appear in only 1 or 2 of the movies (or the Clone Wars, which I haven't watched at all) were the ones most elusive to me. I think I have a much better handle on everyone now.

Table of contents has all of the characters listed with page numbers. The book also contains an index, which is especially helpful for characters who go by more than one name.

Highly recommended. The book is written for 7-17 year-olds, but I think adults (like me) will also enjoy this book.

For more information about this book or to browse inside, please visit DK's website.

I'd like to thank those nice people at DK Canada for this review copy.

Star Wars: Character Encyclopedia by Simon Beecroft, Dorling Kindersley (DK), ©2011. ISBN 9780756682538(Hardcover), 208p.